A few weeks ago for spring break we drove up to Germany and visited relatives. It was a lot of fun. While we drove, I kept track of the different license plates we saw. I enjoy doing that with states when we do long drives in the U.S. So – I thought it might be fun for my non-Europe living friends to go over the list and see how many they know. To make it a little easier for my U.S. friends (we are geography challenged) I put an asterisk by the ones where the name used is different than the English name for the country. Here they are in no particular order:
PL
UA
H
A
E*
F
D*
MD
CZ
RO
SK
BG
SRB
LV
B
CH*
NL
AL
SLO
I
S
HR*
BIH
LT
IRL
FIN
EST
GB
L
If you want to check how many you got right, wikipedia has a nice list.

All the examples I’ve seen so far for dealing with programmatically handling things from a view have involved an activity and the layout associated with it. But when I am working with Android Studio, whenever I create a new activity things are a little different and I get two layouts and things are happening in a fragment rather than the first layout. I don’t totally get the whole thing yet, I’m working on wrapping my mind around it. But today I did figure out something that was really giving me fits and I want to document it for later.

I wanted to start a new activity and in the view for that activity display a chart using the Android GraphView. Jonas provides nice documentation with example code on how to do this. But the fragment thing was really messing me up. I couldn’t figure out where to put the code and how to get it to work. The example I was interested in looks like this:

But I would put it in different places and crash the app or get compiler errors before I even started. I did a lot of searching and reading before I got it to work and I guess I don’t need to rehash all that. It was the accepted answer on this stackoverflow question that finally put the last piece in place for me though.

When I create a new activity the class for it has a class inside that creates the fragment:

I haven’t spent time here in quite a while. The old theme had become broken. I don’t have time to mess with it now – but I switched to the responsive theme, which I like and I’ll get to cleaning it up later. Too busy now.

I started a project to do my homework for the week in the Android class I’m taking. I’ve been doing the bulk of my work on a desktop machine in my office. This week-end I also set up a dev environment on my Fedora laptop at home. I don’t want to have to monkey with copying files and carrying them back and forth so today I set up a GitHub repo so that I could use it to keep things in sync.

I’m no git expert. In the past what I’ve done is create a project in github with a couple pieces in place. Then I pull that down to a directory on my machine, add the files I need and then push all that back up.

Today I took a little bit of a different approach. I created the project. Then in bash I went to the root directory of the project and set things up. It took me a minute to get it all figured out. The git reference on remotes was a huge help. There is also the JetBrains documentation on git with IntelliJ which is what Android studio is built on.

For my own reference – once I got the project built I needed to add everything. First I went to github and made a repo – but I made it empty, not like I usually do. Then I went to the root of my project in bash.

git add .

and then make an initial commit

git commit -m 'initial commit'

I set up the remote

git remote add origin https://github.com/bittercode/learnandplay.git (bittercode is my github user name and learnandplay is the name of the repo I set up.)

Then I pushed the code to the remote

git push -u origin master

And that put it all up at github. Now I should be able to go home and pull it all down there. I also set up AndroidStudio so that it now handles all the git stuff. When I created a new activity it asked me about adding them to git – so I just said that it should default to yes and now I’m on the fast track to happy days.

I’ve got a desktop that I use as my primary work machine. It runs Fedora 18 and drives 2 monitors via an old but serviceable GeForce card.

Unfortunately what that means is I’ve got to live in a world of crappy compromises. It took me quite a while just to get things working. I started with the Nouveau drivers. The problem is that even with all desktop effects turned off – the display starts developing little “artifacts” over time. Or if I want to make the entire desktop completely unusable I just need to start Firefox and visit a page or two. In fact, oddly enough, the Google Sites that Sophie Schmidt made about her trip to North Korea, opened in Firefox will completely trash my whole desktop.

Everything that pops up from here on out is a mess and closing stuff wont help.

It took a while but I got the nVidia drivers to work. Well, that’s not honest. I found JR’s Fedora 18 nVidia Drivers Install / Uninstall Guide and he had figured how to get it to work. I followed the instructions and I was in hog heaven. Firefox worked and I could enable desktop effects for some nice eye candy. I’ve been happily cranking along since.

Then last week a co-worker in the US sent me a google hangout invite and when I went to answer it KDE crashed. This made me sad. I immediately thought of the drivers but tried many other avenues of curing the issue, in the hopes that it was something else. But no. I uninstalled all the nVidia stuff and went back to Nouveau. Hangouts works again and I can’t use Firefox any more.

I really need Hangouts. I wish I didn’t. Well, what I really wished is that all my sofware worked well with the Nouveau drivers or that it all worked with the nVidia drivers. Either one would be acceptable.

Our organization, Cru, is in the process of moving from Exchange to google apps. The list of reasons I need a computer running windows just got shorter. I think I’m down to 2 programs I still need that are win only and we may see changes that will make it possible to leave those behind as well soon. Then again – there is Netflix. Ah well – I may have one windows machine for a while but not needing it to get my full email client is super nice.

This also makes picking up a little chrome book much more doable. They are cheap enough that it might make sense just for taking to meetings. If I get more out of it, that’s all bonus.